Some thoughts on the Rhetorical, Political and Social Implications of
Hypertext Links

Hypertext is a term first used by Theodor H. Nelson in the 1960s to refer to
'non-sequential writing - text that branches and allows choices to the reader,
best read at an interactive screen' (Nelson 1980, 0/2). In contemporary parlance
it has come to refer to the electronic text used to write, publish and read
documents on computers. The terms 'hypertext' and 'hypermedia' are frequently
used interchangeably; these terms refer to "texts composed of blocks of texts...
and the electronic links that join them, using visual information, sound,
animation and other forms of data" (Landow 1992).

Much has been made, in the growing literature about the nature of hypertext,
of the potential of electronic writing to destroy the primacy of the single
autonomous author (Joyce 1995; Landow 1992; Lanham 1993; Taylor and Saarinen
1994a). Certainly, in my role as the 'weaver' of the Levi Jordan Plantation web
site, I have found that my own presence is dissipated and dispersed. In any
hypertext, there are few guideposts about beginnings, middles and ends - readers
decide which links to use, and in which order. The logic of the Net is not
unilinear, nor is it un-linear (though it is, arguably, multilinear).

However, within the context of the Web and CD-ROMs, readers are not able to
create their own links for subsequent readers to use. Within these contexts, the
arguments made by many hypertext authors about the 'death of the author' (and
about the so-called democratic nature of hypertext) (Bolter 1991; Rheingold
1991; Rheingold 1993) are much less convincing. It is this aspect of hypertext
linking that I wish to address in this essay.

On the Internet and in CD-ROM environments, readers may indeed choose their
own pathways through the links we provide, but the links are 'pre-set' by the
time the web site or CD-ROM is published. These links, when examined critically,
reveal what the creators of the hypertext document think about the relative
importance of different chunks of text, images, kinds of data - and what they
think about different points of view. As we make decisions about which links to
provide and where to provide them, these links become, in effect, powerful
rhetorical, political and social devices.

Some of the material available for the Levi Jordan web site content included transcripts from oral
history interviews that were conducted with the white descendants of the owners
of the plantation. Another set of material included data from an oral history
project conducted amongst descendants of the African-American residents. We also
had access to a diary, written by one of Levi Jordan's granddaughters from 1858
to 1874. We had copies of more recent historical research about the people who
owned the plantation in 1888, when it appears that the tenant farmers left the
site very suddenly - and left their possessions behind them. These plantation
owners were very involved in white supremacist activities of the period and seem
to have been responsible for the rapid departure of the tenants from the site -
and, indirectly, responsible for the archaeology itself (Barnes 1998). Finally,
we had the archaeological data, which comes primarily from excavation of those
hastily abandoned quarters.

While each set of material contains much information that is particular to it
alone, each also includes references to many of the same events, people, and
objects. For example, the diary mentions some of the enslaved people by name, and the
archaeological data indicates how enslaved people used various aspects of material
culture. The oral history data refers in turn to some of the same kinds of
activity - and so on. The web site contains many examples of material which, in
'real' space and 'real' time was linked - people had relationships with each
other that merged and converged at numerous points in their lives.

We could, if we wished, have no links from the material about the
European-Americans who lived on the site and the material about the Africans and
African-American residents. We could publish each type of interview data (from
both African-American and European-American descendants) but neglect to provide
internal links from each set of material to different kinds of material that
mention the same or similar things. We could provide only one link into and out
of each set of information. We could also 'hide' certain kinds of 'politically
charged' documents deep within the site, with only one entry and exit point into
and out of those documents.

What would be the effect of having these different types of information
operating independently of each other? This is frequently what happens in
traditional, unilinear, hierarchical presentations of data when people
emphasise one 'history' over another. For example, many 'Black History Month'
presentations (a large component of educational curricula in the United States)
do not discuss the many ways that whites and blacks interacted and influenced
each other in the past. Similarly, traditional 'fancy house' plantation tours do
not usually discuss the lives of enslaved people, and sometimes even professional
historians take an 'either-or', rather than 'both-and' approach to the writing
of history.

If we did not provide internal links from material about the enslaved people' lives to
material about the owners' lives we would, first, fail to illustrate the
contextual nature of knowledge production - but something even more important
would happen as well. We would perpetuate the stereotypical view that there was
little meaningful interaction between the two groups of Jordan Plantation
residents. Traditional binary modes of interpreting human behaviour would be
reinforced. We would be masking the multiple, overlapping, and complex roles
that all of these individuals experienced.

This would not only be a rhetorical act, we maintain that it would also be a
political and social one. The Net does offer archaeologists many opportunities
to deconstruct the ideologies - the 'taken-for-granteds' - that exist in writing
about archaeology and history. However, unless we construct web sites, and the
links within them, critically and reflexively, those opportunities will be lost.
This paper gives some ideas of ways in which the Jordan project
collaborators have attempted to capitalise on these opportunities.